10. The Moon Implicated in the Sinking of the Titanic

There may have been an unindicted co-conspirator in the sinking of the legendary Titanic: the moon. In a paper published in March, two physicists from Texas State University made that case, beginning with an improbable convergence months before the Titanic set sail—on Jan. 4, 1912, to be exact. On that day, the sun and the moon lined up with the Earth in such a way that their combined gravity led to a cycle of unusually high and low tides. By itself, the phenomenon is not that uncommon. But at the same time, the moon just happened to make its closest approach to Earth in 1,400 years. Worse still, on Jan. 3, the Earth made its closest approach to the sun, which happens every year at that time. So the tides on Jan. 4 were not just high, but higher than they’d been in many hundreds of years. The iceberg that claimed the Titanic might have been among many old ones that had become grounded in the relatively shallow waters around Labrador and Newfoundland. The historic tides would have freed a number of them, turning the shipping lanes into the deadly minefield they became that April. And one of those mines—in the wrong spot at the wrong time—sent the Titanic to the bottom, and into history.